BY JANE ALICE KAUFMAN

•••••Imo said she was a virgin, she told it to the whole class the first day. She always wore the same red sweater. I didn’t notice she was beautiful until she told me someone else thought so. The sweater she wore was thick and wooly. It was a v-neck and the collar of our required blue shirt stuck out. She was skinny, you could be sure of that. Her sweater hid whatever shape she was.
•••••She said he loved her the first time he saw her, in a white blouse, it was see-through and sexy, he told her later. He said he wanted her right there. They met in Africa. Their parents were friends. She never talked about the animals in Africa, only him. His name was Steve and she said she missed him.
•••••She told me about the rattle that followed her around, the Altoid tins in her backpack. She was collecting them. In beginning of class she would stack the boxes on the conference table in columns of three. Nine, she said. Her favorite book was Wasted, a memoir of this girl who was bulimic and anorexic. The girl in it went to the same school as we did. She said the girl would smoke cigarettes in the cross bracings of her cabin. She said at home she partied all of the time with her best friend Vanessa, who was beautiful, who was gorgeous, she said. They would drive up to Michigan University. Steve went there. She would get drunk and pass out in his room sometimes. Her mother said she wasn’t supposed to go again. Stevie was so cute. She said the name Stevie like he was in the room, Steevie. She showed me pictures. He’s sleeping here, she said.
•••••Imo said the weekend before she left for boarding school; Vanessa and her ate at a truck stop. They were on their way home from Michigan U; it was the last time she’d see Stevie. The trip hadn’t been too good she said. Stevie and her got into a big fight, he screwed up big time. Even his best friend, Joey, said so. And Joey was an asshole. It started to rain when they pulled in to the truck stop. She ate blueberry pancakes and French fries. They were delicious. They gave her a sugar rush straight up her body, she felt it first in her toes and second in her knees, and you could guess where it went to next. She didn’t know just what got into her. After they had eaten, she told Vanessa she didn’t want to go yet. Vanessa was always filled with crazy ideas and Imo was high on sugar so they danced in the rain. Her shirt was thin and the rain soaked right through. We were sexy, she said, Vanessa was so beautiful and the truckers were watching from the windows. She said it was great. She said it was the greatest. At the time I heard the story, it really did seem like liberation. It wasn’t until I danced in the rain for myself, some days later, that I wondered what she was going on about.
•••••Imo would talk about masturbation a lot, especially because I never did it. She said I was crazy, she said the showerhead was the best, the oooh ahh, legs twitching. She said a girl in our class, Cat, was a lesbian and had molested her in a closet. She said she was raped. She said she loved Stevie.
•••••Stevie wasn’t talking to her right now. She was really skinny but you wouldn’t know because her red sweater hid everything. She said Stevie liked her when he first saw her in Africa, and besides the elephant she rode, I never heard anything else about Africa. She said they re-met in a party at Michigan U later that year and he said, I know her, I went to Africa with her. She’d stay in his dorm room sometimes, he had a girlfriend, and Imo said he wasn’t always right to her. He wasn’t right to me at all, she said. He screwed up big time, she said. I saw her talking to him on a pay phone one time, Imo sounded like she was asking for something. She said I’m not going to talk to him again and she bought another case of Altoids. She ate Jell-O at lunch and then spent twenty minutes in the bathroom. I always wondered what she could be throwing up.
•••••She said Cat had raped her in the closet. In-class we did an exercise where we wrote a secret on a slip of paper and someone else had to write about it. My secret was about when somebody found my diary with the naked pictures I drew in it. Somebody’s secret was that they played Tetris for two days without stopping. That was the secret I got. I thought it was stupid. Imo’s secret was that she got raped by her best friend, but I didn’t think it was her secret at first, I thought it was this girl who had written a rape story. That girl said it wasn’t her’s and she looked embarrassed. Imo talked about Altoids and Stevie a lot. She talked about Altoids because she popped one in after she threw up. She talked about masturbation and dancing in the rain because it made her feel sexy. I asked her about the secret, she said she already told me, that Cat had raped her in a closet. I said I didn’t really think Cat was her best friend. She said Cat had raped her but Stevie had raped her worse. He raped me worse, she said.